Rainforest Automation EMU-2 Technical Manual - Emu-2
EMU-2
™
Technical Manual
23
Price Input Options
The EMU-2
™ provides a number of methods to allow the input of a value for the
commodity Price. This flexibility allows it to work with a variety of smart meter
deployment configurations.
There is a hierarchy of Price input methods. Listed highest priority first, they are:
1) Meter Price Cluster support
– this input overrides any of the others.
2) Text Message parsing
– this input overrides manual input.
3) Manual input
– this is the default for most deployments.
This hierarchy makes it easy to migrate from the simplest type of meter deployment (no
Price support in the meter) to more sophisticated Price options with no changes to the
EMU-2
™.
Manual Input
For smart meter deployments with no pricing in the meter, the users can simply enter
the commodity price themselves using the Set Rate screen in Configuration Mode, as
described in the EMU-2
™ User Manual. Besides being prone to user error, this method
is only really practical for flat rate tariffs.
Text Message Input
A firmware option is available for EMU-2
™ to allow the commodity Price and Price Tier
to be set (simulating a Price Cluster PublishPrice Command) using specially formatted
text messages. This technique is called Message Tunneling, and is much the same as
alternative method for Prepay support mentioned in the
“Prepay Support” section of this
manual.
If Message Tunneling support is enabled in the EMU-2
™, then the incoming text
message is scanned, looking for the following pattern
CURRENT TIER y=$x.xxxx/kWh
Where:
y is the Price Tier (1-5)
x.xxxx is the Price in dollars ($0.0000 - $9.9999)
Using this method will overwrite any Price value that has been set manually using the
Set Rate screen.